BY DEBRA KEEFER RAMAGE
The theme this year tying all the Minnehaha Avenue news together is the fusion of culture and sustainability. Minnehaha Avenue is sustainability city, from its start in the Seward neighborhood, to its end at the beautiful waterfall and park from which it gets its name. Last year we expounded on the (counter) culture of this corridor in the city, and so now we will perforce possibly revisit a few establishments to look into their sustainability credentials.
It’s a mere two months until one of the best things about summer in South Minneapolis—the annual Longfellow Roots Rock and Deep Blues Festival, or LRRDBF to the aficionados. This year will be the sixth one, and the only thing I can tell you for sure is that it will happen, that the date is July 16, that the initial music lineup has been announced, but more are to be announced as the time draws near, that tickets have been on sale for over a month—hang on, that’s actually quite a lot that I can tell you. Here’s another thing, though: If you’re set on going to it, you should buy tickets now. The organizers are not selling as many tickets as last year (“going back to a smaller footprint” they say) due to the ongoing road construction on Minnehaha Avenue.
Another cool way to see the LRRDBF is to volunteer. You can dispense drinks or check IDs during the festival, set up before, or tear down after. You can “aid the musicians,” whatever that means. (I don’t think it means anything creepy.) Or you can be part of the zero waste team. This festival is astonishingly green! Consider: 1) bike-park-lock barricades, 500 feet of them; 2) bicycle valet service provided by The Hub Bike Co-op; 3) free Metro Transit rides; 4) free Uber rides. All that plus zero waste—all items inside the festival will be compostable, reusable, or as a last resort, recyclable (i.e., beer bottles).
In an earlier article about Lake Street, we mentioned the advent of a business node called Downtown Longfellow. This group, which already includes Harriet Brewing, one of the founding partners in the LRRDBF, is playing a major role in this year’s festival. This new “brand” encompasses restaurants like Le Town Talk Diner, El Nuevo Rodeo and Gandhi Mahal, as well as other businesses like the Hub. I suppose the involvement of the Bike Co-op is partly the reason behind all this green stuff. Well, a lot of it anyway.
So far, the music lineup includes Charlie Parr, the Black-eyed Snakes, Erik Koskinen, Dave Moore, Lightnin’ Malcolm, Crankshaft and the Gear Grinders, Spider John Koerner, and many more. This year, the festival is billed as Music and Art, so the League of Longfellow Artists, and other local artists recruited individually, will be a bigger part than in years past. Food offerings will be from many of the same sources as last year with its International Food Court. Look for Bangla (Indian), Himalayan (Indian), Mexican, French and Japanese. For more information about the LRRDBF, see the website rootsrockdeepblues.com.
Speaking of Gandhi Mahal, that place is so much more than a restaurant. You should check out owner Ruhel Islam’s blog (link found on the restaurant’s website) to see some of the amazing things he and the restaurant have done and are doing in the fields of sustainability, food resilience and community empowerment. This writer has attended many events in its community room in the past year. One of the best was a workshop on growing year-round indoor salad gardens. Recently another event of much import held there was a presentation by MN350 of the soon-to-launch Break Free Midwest, aimed at stopping tar sands extraction and pipelines. One of Ruhel’s goals in starting the restaurant was to bring Bangla (the culture of Bangladesh, his native country) ideals about local food self-sufficiency to Minnesota. From the outset they have sourced food from farmers markets, community gardens or Ruhel’s own yard. Another astonishingly green thing—all the used cooking oil is recycled into biofuel, keeping it out of landfills and the water supply. A couple of years ago they installed the closed-loop aquaponics system in the basement, which supplies a good chunk of the salad greens, herbs and tilapia. (If you haven’t taken the tour, you should. It’s fascinating.) And the latest thing—honeybees on the roof.
Maybe Gandhi Mahal is inspiring other Minnehaha Avenue businesses. Recently a longtime favorite in the area, Parkway Pizza, 4359 Minnehaha Ave., announced that it had bought a CSA share from a nearby urban farm, Growing Lots. A few weeks later, they held a fundraiser for them, with live music and the works.
Honeybees leads us right into another transformational enterprise on Minnehaha Avenue, this one well north of Lake Street—the Beez Kneez. As you can guess from the name, this organization is all about honeybees. They sell honey products, and beeswax, but also pollinator kits, pledges to help bees with a yard sign, and other advocacy gear. And they offer a service of year-round bicycle delivery of “honey to your home.” (Bicycle delivery—this was pioneered by Peace Coffee, yet another amazing, multi-purpose, community-serving business on Minnehaha Avenue.) A really unique service they offer is pedal-powered honey extraction. Beekeepers can rent the equipment and space by the hour to do their own extraction, a daunting prospect without the right expertise and equipment.
A different kind of green establishment now open on Minnehaha north of Lake is the ReUse Retail Warehouse. They sell recycled fixtures, appliances and other items from rehabbing houses. They are part of Better Futures Minnesota, an organization that engages men who have had a history of incarceration, homelessness, poverty and untreated mental and physical health challenges to help them achieve self-sufficiency and a better future for themselves and their communities.
Way south of Lake Street, at 40th and Minnehaha, is the headquarters of Community Solar. In the same block is Natural-Built Home, a building supply store that sells only sustainable and/or recycled home improvement products. They are a great source for things like zero-VOC paints, cork flooring, or countertops made from recycled glass. Community Solar is an innovative utility company that operates a “solar garden” and sells shares in it to homeowners and renters alike, enabling people to use solar energy without investing in their own panels.
Located at Adams Triangle, 4100 Minnehaha Ave., Adams Triangle Community Orchard is, or is going to be, a community orchard featuring edible fruit trees that anyone can pick and eat. In time, the space will also include a picnic shelter, pollinator habitat, educational signage and a community pie oven! On May 22, there will be a tree-planting event there. The Minneapolis Park & Recreation Board has set aside 35 fruit trees for the first phase of Adams Grove. The planting starts at 11 a.m. and will last a couple of hours, give or take. Bring your own gloves; light refreshment will be provided.
Sustainability isn’t only about food and energy and recycling. It’s about building alternatives to all kinds of exploitative systems, and a piece of that is a thing called the sharing economy. Public libraries embody the spirit of the sharing economy like nothing else, except if you add the small-systems and local-focus approach and you get—Little Free Libraries. The day before the Adams Grove event, on May 21, starting at 10 a.m. at Minnehaha Park, there will be an amazing Little Free Library Festival. Check this out at LittleFreeLibrary.org/Festival. Besides giving away 100 new little libraries, the event features dressed-up dogs, skaters in tutus, poetry reciting scholars, Larry Long, Kevin Kling, The Brass Messengers, Soozin Hirschmugl and a toy theater puppet show, Dan Chouinard, Prudence Johnson, Ann Reed, Courtney Holmes, T Michael Rambo and Jeff Kamin. And food trucks. You can sign up on their website (if there are any left) to receive one of the Little Free Libraries.
Some other free or low-cost cultural activities continue on Minnehaha Ave. The movies and music in the park series has a stunning lineup at Minnehaha Falls Regional Park. With three concerts a week, from June through September, space does not permit listing them, but some highlights that caught my eye included Sweet Rhubarb (eclectic folk) June 9, Handsome Midnight (’90s style alternative) June 29, The Homestead Act (original folk rock) July 1, Machinery Hill (Americana) July 13, World Jazz Collegium (jazz, international) July 28, Fistful of Datas (’90s, pop, danceable) Aug. 5, Ukulele Drive (singing ukuleles) Aug. 18, and Mother Banjo (Americana) Aug. 31.
If movies are more your thing, especially eclectic, arty or classic movies, Minnehaha Avenue offers the Trylon Microcinema—not free, but cheap. Right now, they’re in the middle of a Robert Mitchum series. Coming up are “The Racket” (May 20-22) and “The Friends of Eddie Coyle” (May 27-29). In June, there is a series of five classic Spike Lee films: “Do the Right Thing,” “Mo’ Better Blues,” “Jungle Fever,” “School Daze” and “She’s Gotta Have It.” Then in July there will be an “Ozploitation” series, featuring “Mad Max” (of course), “Wake In Fright,” “Long Weekend,” and “The Last Wave.”
